Anthropology, health and ethics: experiential and epistemic notes for an intercultural bioethics EAntropología, salud y ética: apuntes experienciales y epistémicos para una bioética intercultural

Abstract

Human experiences related to health shape, throughout the course of illness, countless meanings, changes, perceptions, adaptations, negotiations, and agencies regarding the ethical dilemmas that each being–actor–patient resolves based on their own material, ideological, identity-based, and cultural conditions, in order to cope with such physiological imbalance or instability. These dilemmas are nourished by values and moral codes that surround the ontological thinking of those facing such reality, to the extent that personal experiences of suffering and vulnerability become valuable knowledge for determining the meaning of illness throughout life. After conducting ethnographic research with patients suffering from chronic illnesses and establishing the meaning of the vulnerability of diseased bodies, the concept of intercultural bioethics emerges as a way to analyze the (inter)connections between affections, care, identity, and culture from the perspective of medical anthropology.